KHARTOUM, Sudan – Clad in the green of Islam and his hair in dreadlocks, the angry young protester raised the sword over his head and proclaimed the West should know the Prophet Muhammad cannot be insulted.

Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher, should be executed for allowing her students to bestow the name Muhammad on a class teddy bear, he said.

“What she did requires her life be taken,” Yassin Mubarak said amid a crowd of several thousand Sudanese protesters Friday in central Khartoum.

Gibbons, who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in jail and deportation, was taken from her prison to a secret location to ensure her safety, said her defense lawyer. She also spoke to her son and daughter back home, saying Britons should not resent Muslims over her case.

Still, the anger over a teddy bear mystified many in the West.

The answer may lie in the ideology that President Omar al-Bashir’s Islamic regime has long instilled in Sudan: a mix of anti-colonialism, religious fundamentalism and a sense the West is besieging Islam.

While the government does not want to seriously damage ties with Britain, the show of anger underlines its stance that the Sudanese oppose Western interference, lawyers and political foes said. The uproar comes as the U.N. is accusing Sudan of dragging its feet on the deployment of peacekeepers in the war-torn Darfur region.

“You take an event like this teacher incident, enlarge it and make a bomb out of it,” Gibbons’ chief lawyer, Kamal al-Gizouli, said. The aim is to show that “Muslims in Sudan don’t want these people (Westerners) to interfere. We want African troops.”

With the strong religious feeling fueled by the government, “if you tell the people that someone has done such and such, they get angry … without (finding out) what exactly happened, the facts, the reality,” al-Gizouli said.

There was no overt sign the government had organized Friday’s protest, though it could not have taken place without official consent.

In their mosque sermons Friday, several Muslim clerics told worshippers Gibbons had intentionally insulted the prophet, but they did not call for protests and said the court-ordered punishment was sufficient.

The protest was far smaller than rallies by tens of thousands of Sudanese that had government backing in February 2006 after European newspapers ran caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, suggesting popular anger against Gibbons did not run as deep.

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